I’m actually in the middle of training leaders, and an interesting question popped up: when people are being leaders, are they demonstrating what to be, or what others want to see?

It’s quite a tricky  question because on one hand, leaders do things that make them leaders but nobody really calls into question whether they are “faking” it. Sometimes, it’s people who “display” leadership at the right time that become leaders, get praised or promoted as a result of it.

At the same time, people who have leadership skills but do not display or communicate this may end up sidelined, simply because there is a perception of this lack of leadership ability.

In evaluations and assessments, we propagate that people are leaders because they exhibit certain behaviors. But there are some people who do not exhibit such behaviors that people still want to follow. Could it merely be a perception? And are we barking up the wrong tree when we call for behavioral assessments? Is leadership more of an “intangible” quality?

I would like to believe that such an assessment is useful to a certain extent, and that “x-factor” will require a bit more than just a behavioral assessment in a moment of time. After all, we also need to assess if person A has “more” of the x-factor than person B a lot of the time.

It even appears that there are some people who step up to leadership only after they are pushed into it. I’ve heard from someone that good leaders are often reluctant ones.

Some of us are great leaders in one context, but flop in another. Perhaps then, leadership is nothing more than a projection of people’s expectations. Perhaps there’s something more to that. And often, it takes an extraordinary situation before an ordinary person can be recognized as being a leader.

Perhaps, if someone isn’t deemed a leader, that person hasn’t met with an extraordinary situation they can step up to… yet.